Astonishingly some of the organisations involved in the scheme call themselves charities. Like the worst kind of Ned Flanders fucking do-gooders, these nasty pieces of work have even decided that forcing people to work without pay under the threat of homelessness and destitution is ‘helping them’. And all the money they make will just mean they can carry out more of their wonderful work, and of course help keep charity manager’s salaries nice and high.

All of these charities need to be exposed so the public can decide for themselves what they think of their vile activities. The good news is that some of them are so fucking shameless that they have been bragging about their involvement with workfare.

@PaulHuxtable01 is the Development Officer of @West_Pathfinder and is currently singing the praises of forcing people to work without pay on twitter. Community Work Placements will help people with no experience they claim, ignoring that even people currently working part-time can be sent on the scheme. So can those who are already genuinely volunteering, meaning charities involved in workfare can now steal volunteers from other organisations too ethical to take part. They really are a bunch of scabs. Westward Pathfinder also have a facebook page if you want to make your views known.

@GroundworkUK have also said they will be involved in Community Work Placements. It is unclear whether they have a sub-contract or not but they have confirmed they are quite happy to force people to work for them on the scheme.

Another charity involved in Community Work Placements (spotted by @refuted) is Faith Regen who are on twitter @faithregen and have a facebook page, although they can’t be bothered to keep either updated. No doubt they’ll just get someone on workfare to do it, why pay people after all?

There should be no squeamishness about holding so-called charities to account for their involvement in forced labour. Community Work Placements are breath-takingly cruel and two pilot schemes have already shown that workfare does nothing to help people find work. This is about punishing unemployed people and making life so unbearable on benefits that people will accept almost any old shit in the workplace to avoid it. It is the workhouse updated and nothing else. Charities who are too stupid or greedy to realise this should be treated with the same contempt usually reserved for their new paymasters G4S and all the rest of the poverty profiteers with their snouts in the workfare trough.

55 responses to “Hunting Down The Workfare Exploiters – Shame On Westward Pathfinder”

I have just completed 4 weeks MWA at a charity! Charity my ass,it is nothing more than a business,the stock is donated,the majority of the “Staff” are MWA or some other abortion of a private government funded provider (Pimps) the head of the Charity is on £92K plus pension, car and expenses for a 3 day week eating canapes and drinking Bolly.

jray: Why did you not report this “charity?” to Boycott Workfare? They keep a list of all these snide charities making money off the back of the unemployed.

It’s no good you going there and completing that MWA without doing something about it. You have to name and shame them. If you’re on twitter you should have had their name publicized everywhere as an exploiter of the poorest people in society.

We have to pull together on this and coordinate our efforts or our cause get’s undermined.

You completing that 4 weeks without doing anything about it is a victory for them. That’s what they’re relying on to keep this farce going.

They are already on the list,I will be more specific as soon as the rest have finished,why? because I don’t trust A4E who profited from this.I also am in the middle of a ICE complaint and do not want A4E to try and use this as an excuse for their piss poor behaviour.

I was under the impession that slavery had been abolished and that it was criminal to force people to work without pay.
They can just go and fuck thereselves if they think I am going to work a forty hour week for petrol expenses while the rest of the workforce are laughing there tits of and ridiculing me for doing it, Ithought that type of bullying in the workplace was also illegal,i think everyone should play the bullying card with a solicitors backing and then see how long this form of slavery lasts.

Another organisation planning on taking part in the government’s slave Community Work Placements programme is Portsmouth City Council, which is currently advertising for someone whose job it will be to arrange the placements:

So let me get this straight; if you are sent on a MWA with one of these undisclosed companies the volunteer signs a legal disclaimer stating they won’t divulge the name of the company involved? Can anyone who has been on one confirm this?

I don’t see how anyone can force a slave to sign any form ..after all if you sign it because you have to …Then it’s not free will, you would be forced into it by threat of something!
I for one will publish the name of the place and while i am at it i will write letters to the papers as well .. What can they do to you? Prison well i will look forward to that one free meals, heating. lighting, sleeping and you don’t have to see visitors unless you want to!! Bring it on.

I’d guess in the big house you wouldn’t need to do any mandatory work activity nor box ticking exercises to pay some providers salary. And let’s face it the jobless are being treated like criminals with community placements as it is so prison isn’t that different. Well apart from the soap on a rope business, IDS hasn’t quite worked out how to inflict that indignity on us. Yet…

If you get sent to the chokey, you ironically get more out of A4e than you would get on the outside! Most of their vacancies recently have been for tutors to deliver vocational courses to people who are being detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

And what about Employer’s Liability Insurance? I don’t know how insurance companies would view it, but the government have made it quite clear that these placements are not voluntary, and are also not jobs because they are not paid positions.

As far as union recognition is concerned, I would suggest considering the Industrial Workers of the World who are very active in picketing Workfare exploiters where they are known, and regard anyone, working or a JSA claimant a worker and who regard them as equals with an equal say and equal rights unlike some of the business unions who see the unemployed as some kind of lesser being that is basically being used as a cash cow.

The IWW is a grass-roots union run directly by workers, it employs no officials and doesn’t need union recognition from an employer, as any boss facing an office full of very unhappy workers will soon recognise there is an issue they need to deal with pronto!

No one in the IWW will tell you what to do – there are of course rules that anyone in the union has to abide by, but all branches have a lot of autonomy being able to decide on the kind of actions to be taken, how they are taken etc. It’s a union in which everyone is a leader – which means every member is an activist, taking responsibility.

For someone being sent on CWP the monthly dues for IWW membership would be £1 as that person would still be seen as unemployed, indeed the IWW regards these schemes as tantamount to slavery, undermining the position of all workers.

On your own you will be isolated and vulnerable. Even in a mainstream union you would remain vulnerable and maybe, (or most likely not) the union might make some kind of token representation on your behalf. If you were in the IWW and there were enough other members locally, or even nearby ways would be found to take some kind of direct action, and this is guaranteed because you as a member would be organising it an taking part – with a lot of support from the IWW.

If there isn’t branch of the IWW locally, why not think about forming one? All you have to do is contact the IWW

I NEVER THOUGHT THAT I WOULD EVER SAY IT, BUT AFTER STUDYING PAGE AFTER PAGE OF MISERY AND DISTRESS, THE ONLY OPINION THAT I CAN REACH IS THAT GOVERNMENT POLICY HAS BEEN DELIBERATELY WRITTEN TO KILL PEOPLE…………………

WHETHER IT BE THE DISABLED, THE UNEMPLOYED, THE ELDERLY, THE HOMELESS, THE NHS, THE CARE FACILITIES, EVERYTHING HAS BEEN CAREFULLY ENGINEERED TO TAKE HUMAN LIVES.

SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, HAS REACHED THE OPINION THAT THOSE OF A LOWER CASTE ARE NOT WORTHY OF A LIFE.

WHAT WE ARE WITNESSING IS A CULL OF EPIC PROPORTIONS DRIVEN BY A DERANGED FEW.

THE ACT OF REFUSING TO PUBLISH GROWING MORTALITY STATISTICS IS EVIDENCE THAT THE EXTERMINATION OF PEOPLE FROM OUR SOCIETY HAS BEEN CAREFULLY ORCHESTRATED BY THOSE SEEKING ANONYMITY.

I AM NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORIST. BUT WHAT WE ARE ALL FAILING TO SEE IS THE FINAL SOLUTION…………………..

SEEMINGLY WORKED ON A GLOBAL SCALE, ALL THE PIECES OF THE JIGSAW ARE STARTING TO FORM A PICTURE WHERE THE POOR AND INJURED MUST FALL TO FORM SOME KIND OF MISTAKEN UTOPIA FOR THOSE WHO ARE ALLOWED TO PROSPER.

ONLY TIME WILL REVEAL THE FULL EXTENT OF THIS SICK EXPERIMENT WHERE THE BASICS OF NATURE, SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, HAS BEEN UNLEASHED ON THE UNWARY………….

SINCE WHEN HAVE THE DEATHS OF SO MANY BEEN HIDDEN FROM PUBLIC VIEW?

MARK MY WORD, CLASS WAR HAS ALREADY BEGUN.

IT SAYS ON NEARLY EVERY MEMORIAL TO THE FALLEN, “LEST WE FORGET”……………………

IT SEEMS WE HAVE LOST DIRECTION IN WHAT WE WERE FIGHTING FOR……………………………………………………..

Hi Geoff
Was a witness to hearing a guy withlearning disabilities being sanctioned. I heard the conversation. I saw the guy at the beginning of the week and it was very clear to me that he had learningdifficulties. He clearly did not understand what they meant and they sanctioned him. What kind of support do they have .

I’ve noticed in the last week, that my local Tesco (Harlesden) and Poundstretcher have many more staff than they usually have, and I mean MANY more, and I have also noticed the TERRIBLE stacking of goods in these stores, much of it wrongly labelled or on completely the wrong shelf. Looks to me like Workfare = Sabotage, ha ha!!

It’s almost like the old WORK TO RULE trick but when there is very little incentive to work for your giro it’s hardly any wonder. Although I’ve yet to be put on MWA and not light fingered I couldn’t really blame anyone for scuppering the companies they graft for. I expect we’ll see a hell of a lot more of that kind of thing and once goods go walkies/profits nosedive it’ll dawn on these companies what they are doing…

Anyone who has done any kind of study of slave/forced labour will know that it’s hardly the most efficient way to do things, and the example above is classic – and I too think we’ll see a lot more of it, if not actual theft things will actually go very awry, different codes put on things etc. In the latter stages of WW2 French railway workers swapped goods destination indicators on goods wagons ensuring that lots of materiel ended up in the wrong desitination – imagine that happening in a modern distribution centre for the supermarkets.

obi
we are in a speeded up thatcherite economy…check the work of the jimmy reid foundation’s, robin mcalpine on youtube…..our economic system is set up to maximize profits, to make money out of money without doing anything else…the uk’s industrial productivity has dropped 30% since the time of thatcher….their economic system, its not ours, but theirs we have no say in it, depends on us working for scraps…

It’s all part of the Neo-Liberal plot to maximize the profits of an elite group of people, corporations etc by driving down wages and conditions for ordinary people.

The Neo-Liberal bit that’s used on the welfare system is making life on benefits so unbearable that you either kill yourself or give in and take the worst possible job imaginable, worst pay, worst hours and worst conditions.

That this cruel form of political ideology is also being forced on the sick/disabled is beyond despicable. Even worse the Labour party is full of these Neo-Liberal wankers.

raining
thinking today that they have spent over a trillion pounds trying to crush/stop working class form organizing, since @ least 1979….the winter of discontent and a few tons of rubbish piled up in the streets come to mind….and the rampant general 26% inflation 1978, that was bad for the unification that has now taken place in the financial sector, and the rampant house price inflation, which depends on crushing working class power, and is reflected in the low wage/work for nothing economy that we now have…..inflation is actually as high as ever, but now affects the working classes more than ever….and the rich less than ever….

With respect, I don’t think they are seeing them for what they – they are scared of the public outcry!
Boycottworkfare & other organisations have been tireless exposing the evils of workfare, so has the disabled activist group Black Triangle.
I think the picketing of the charity shops, put them off, I have charity shops that I wouldn’t enter if you tied me up and dragged me in kicking and screaming, the worst are those that are so-called religious ones, the Salvation Army being a case in point. I don’t think that they will ever get over the fact that they abused people on workfare, I’m not taken to public displays
of anger, but, they get the wrong end of my tongue when they offer me the war cry or ask for donations on the street.

Because of the raised retirement age, those on benefit as deemed still of working age up to 66 are also within this Workfare system, even if disabled / chronic sick, despite not being listed in unemployment statistics beyond age 60.

Women lost state pension payout at 60 from 2013, which is payable if retire or remain in work.

When rich women MPs kept pension payout at 60 from 2012.

Those on benefit amongst the working poor (including half of women aged 60-66) are even forced onto Workfare, you say, when working on too low an income part-time. So on benefit, lost the paying job, and having to fork out what money exactly to work 6 months for a charity?

When sanctioned off benefits you cannot gain Food Bank vouchers, when they are the most likely to starve (takes over a month without eating to suffer hospital admission caused by malnutrition, quicker if not thin).

By raised retirement age a woman cannot get her bus pass to go on this jub without wages for half a year.

The firm cannot even give you a free lunch or a cup of tea as that is payment and therefore the firm must pay tax for your employment.

What is Labour saying to all this. Just that there will be a revised Workfare under Labour, forcing workers onto the minimum wage, so losing living wage jobs in the firm.

bring back
what are the figures, that you exclude for men, who have lost access to PGC, currently worth £150/wk approx, used to be eligible @ 60, with the pension age escalator…this has wiped billions of spending power out of our economy, does cause extreme hardships, but has pleased the money markets…

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